which has given to his dales and hills so cherished a place in our literature. The scenes familiar to him from infancy were loved by him to the end with an ardent and grateful affection which he never wearied of publishing to the world. No mountain-landscapes had ever before been drawn so fully, so accurately, and in such felicitous language. Every lineament of his hills and dales is depicted as luminously and faithfully in his verse as it is reflected on the placid surface of his beloved meres, but suffused by him with an ethereal glow of human sympathy. He drew from his mountain-landscape everything that
Can give an inward help, can purify
And elevate, and harmonize and soothe.
It brought to him 'authentic tidings of invisible things'; filled him with
The sense
Of majesty and beauty and repose,
A blended holiness of earth and sky.
For his obligations to that native scenery he found continual expression.
Ye mountains and ye lakes,
And sounding cataracts, ye mists and winds
That dwell among the hills where I was born.
If in my youth I have been pure in heart.
If, mingling with the world, I am content
With my own modest pleasures, and have lived
With God and Nature communing, removed
From little enmities and low desires—
The gift is yours.
Not only did his observant eye catch each variety of form, each passing tint of colour on his hills and valleys, he felt, as no poet before his time had done,
